Tyko Sallinen

Tyko Konstantin Sallinen was born in Nurmes on March 14, 1879, into a strict fundamentalist tailor's family. Running away from home at fourteen to work as a journeyman tailor in Sweden, Sallinen later studied drawing in Helsinki and Paris.

In 1918, his monumental paintings The Barn Dance (Jytkyt) and The Fanatics (Hihhulit), portraying ecstatic religious revivalists in the northern forests, caused the biggest aesthetic scandal in Finnish art history. Embracing mud-browns, sulfurous greens, and violent physical movement, Sallinen was the undisputed titan of Finnish expressionism.